Today’s Google I/O keynote introduced a new technology called Android Instant Apps . In a nutshell, Instant Apps displays a small, focused portion of an app when a user clicks on a related link — even if the app isn’t installed on their system. The example used in the keynote was the Buzzfeed Video app: when a user clicks on a URL to view a Buzzfeed video, and doesn’t have the app installed, the URL is intercepted by the Android system and opened in a part of the app, delivered from the Google Play servers,
https://youtu.be/cosqlfqrpFA
Instant Apps requires the app creator to build their app in a prescribed way, using deep linking and setting up modular views, but it apparently only takes about a day to modify an existing app to work in this way. There are still some unanswered questions about Instant Apps, not least in regards to whether their use is optional.